“ROCKET”
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The Brownsville–Karachi Air Bridge and Major General Lars Henry Kristofferson
In one wartime newspaper photograph, a cartoon pilot straddles a rocket.
Behind him, two hand-painted signs:
Brownsville — marked with a cactus.
Karachi — marked with a cobra.
Above them, one word: ROCKET.
It looked playful. It wasn’t.
That image commemorated one of World War II’s fastest air transport lifelines — a high-priority route linking South Texas to Africa, the Middle East, India, and the China-Burma-India Theater.
At the center of that effort was a Brownsville Pan Am pilot turned Air Transport Command officer:
Major General Lars Henry Christopher Kristofferson.
From Pan Am Pilot to Wartime Planner
When Kristofferson joined Pan American World Airways in 1934, Brownsville was already a strategic aviation gateway. Crews rotated through. Aircraft staged southward. The Rio Grande Valley was tied into an expanding global route network.
By 1941, as war spread across Europe and North Africa, Pan Am’s African operations became critical. Kristofferson — then chief pilot and later operations manager — helped organize and refine the trans-African transport system before it was formally militarized.
When the U.S. Army Air Forces assumed control, he moved into uniform, eventually serving as assistant chief of staff for operations in the Air Transport Command.
The framework he helped build moved freight from West Africa to Cairo — and onward into the Middle East and India — at a pace that surprised even seasoned logisticians.
For that work, he received the Legion of Merit.
The “Rocket Run”
The so-called “Rocket Run” was not a single flight but a rapid, tightly scheduled transport corridor linking key staging points across continents.
Brownsville was one end of that network.
Karachi was another.
Aircraft dispatched through the system carried urgently needed materiel supporting Allied campaigns in North Africa and the China-Burma-India Theater. Timing mattered. Reliability mattered more.
The British government recognized the significance of those operations. Kristofferson was awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in a ceremony held in San Francisco at the residence of the British consul general. The citation referenced his ability to maintain a regular, dependable air schedule from Northern India to China under wartime conditions.
Again — not glamorous flying. Strategic flying.
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1944 0224 awarded Air Medal at New Delhi (on the left is General Earl Hoag)
The Brownsville Circle: George Kraigher
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Kristofferson was not working alone. Another key figure in this story was George Kraigher, chief pilot and operations manager at Pan Am’s Brownsville base.
Kraigher later oversaw operations in Africa and was similarly credited for helping establish the Africa–Middle East Air Transport Service.
Today, Kraigher’s name lives quietly in architecture as well. His Brownsville residence at 525 Paredes Line Road was designed by modernist architect Richard J. Neutra in 1937.
The George Kraigher House — once endangered, now restored — remains one of the most significant modernist structures in Texas. It stands as a physical reminder of a generation of globally engaged aviators who once called Brownsville home.
Over the Hump
After Africa, Kristofferson transferred to the China-Burma-India Theater. There he helped oversee “Hump” operations — flights over the Himalayas linking India to China.
Later accounts credit him with pioneering night flights in that corridor and assisting in maintaining round-the-clock operations under extreme conditions.
After VE Day, he participated in relocating major air assets, including the repositioning of the Eighth Air Force. During the Korean War, he returned to active duty and organized military air transport operations from the West Coast to Asia.
His career moved wherever aviation was expanding.
Family in Brownsville
1944 0305 The_Brownsville_Herald_Sun
While Kristofferson served overseas, his wife Mary and their children lived in Brownsville. Local newspapers ran photographs of the children waiting for their father’s return from the Far East.
1977 0320 Family Weekly - author Patricia Baum
One of those children — born in Brownsville in 1936 — would later become known worldwide as Kris Kristofferson.
Long before Hollywood or Nashville, Herald headlines described “Kristy” winning a Rhodes Scholarship and excelling in ROTC.
The arc from disciplined Air Force household to songwriter is often told as contrast. But aviation runs through both stories.
Final Years
After World War II, Kristofferson returned to Pan Am in executive roles, later leading a team assisting Pakistan in establishing a national air transport service. In 1956 he left Pan American to manage the aviation division of the Arabian-American Oil Company in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
He died on January 1, 1971, at age 65.
Obituaries listed airlift operations in Africa, India, the Pacific, and the Middle East.
Brownsville’s newspapers had already recorded his role decades earlier — in small columns, without fanfare.
The Meaning of the Rocket
That cartoon rocket between Brownsville and Karachi was not exaggeration.
It symbolized speed, coordination, and a new kind of warfare — one fought not only with bombers and fighters, but with schedules, route maps, and freight manifests.
In the 1940s, Brownsville was not watching global aviation history from the sidelines.
It was helping move it.
And the man helping organize that movement carried a name now known for very different reasons — but first known here for flight.
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